Hawat

I've got a slightly different perspective on Alwan than that of most Spidweb forum denizens, because I've only played Geneforge 5. I found G5 Alwan to be an interesting character, as he's physically disabled and has to deal with chronic pain (which resonates with me because I have a neurological issue that causes chronic pain), yet is powerful, respected, and feared, both militarily and politically. He also is less ruthless than other G5 characters with similarly unyielding views on how the war needs to end. In most play-throughs, I have ended up supporting his side out of respect and admiration for the character. I wish it were possible to know how I'd view him if I'd played through the series, and done so in order, before meeting the character in G5.

Jeff, Thank you for asking for feedback. I do have a couple of suggestions. 1. Make higher levels of skill in summon skills do something useful. Right now, a wolf summoned with lvl one call wolf is exactly as strong as a wolf summoned with lvl eleven call wolf (the same is true of all other summon skills). This is not what the tooltips say and is a bit confusing. My personal suggestion would be to have each skill level alternate between increasing summon duration by 25% of the base summon duration and the level of the summoned monster. So, for instance, a wolf summoned at level one skill would have no bonuses, at level 2 it would have 125% of base summon duration, at level 3 skill it would have 125% of base summon duration and the wolf itself would be a level higher, at level 5 skill it would have 150% of base skill duration and the wolf itself would be two levels higher, and then levels 7 and 8 would increase both summon duration and wolf level (in keeping with how levels 7 and 8 work with other skills), so that a wolf summoned at level 8 in the skill would have 225% of the normal summon duration and +4 levels to the wolf itself. 2. The Summon skills at the top of the skill tree should be stronger than the summon skills at the bottom of the tree are when the skill levels in both skills are equal. So a salamander summoned at skill level one would be stronger than a wolf summoned at skill level one,etc. The only difference between the top of the skill tree creature summons and the bottom of the tree summons is the activated ability the summoned creatures have. Their health, armor, chance to hit and attack damage are equal. This seems odd. 3. Scarabs should work off from the character's highest attribute. This would offer the highest level of flexibility for how players could build their characters. Don't know how technically feasible it is, but it'd be really cool. 4. I may well be the only person on earth who cares about this, but I think it'd be really cool if the scarab Summon Major Aid was effected by the Shaman passive skill Beast Focus. The role player in me thinks that my Shaman with level 8 beast focus should be able to call a much stronger monster with that scarab than a Blademaster or something could. 5. On skills that are too strong/too weak, call the storm always seemed kinda lousy to me. And the duration on the shaman thorns skill was too short for it to be useful.

Thank you for making this. Just a couple of days ago I was wishing someone would. I second Reverend's strategy central nomination.

In short, they are very, very strange. Not that this is a huge surprise. Leave your sanity at the door, etc. Here's what I've figured out through testing so far. 1. Non-Simulacrum Summons do not get stronger with character level. A level 24 and a level 14 character summon exactly the same creature. 2. Non-Simulacrum Summons do get stronger with the Summoning Focus trait. Each level of Summoning Focus increases a shade's chance to hit by 12%. 3. Simulacrum Summons are unaffected by the Summoning Focus trait. 4. Simulacrum Summons do get stronger with character level. A goblin summoned by a lvl 24 character has a 90% chance to hit against a Sith Warrior. A goblin summoned by a level 19 player has a 60% chance. A goblin summoned by a level 14 character has a 30% chance. It looks like every increase in character level increases the level of simulacrum summons by one as well. This tracks exactly with how summoning mastery works in that every summon level gained by the traits adds 6% to chance to hit. 5. The level of the monster you soul capture doesn't seem to track with the level of the monster you summon like you'd think. A summoned quick ghast has an 8% better chance to hit than a summoned ghast when both are summoned by level 14 characters. However, a shade summoned with Summoning Focus 3 has a 53% chance to hit an enemy ghast but only a 20% (hard coded minimum) chance to hit an enemy quick ghast. I can't quite figure out what's going on here, but it looks like Simulacrum summons end up close to your character level regardless of the level of the enemy you soul captured. A few thoughts on what this testing implies: Summons will never do much damage because they will never be significantly higher level than your player characters. Summoning focus is a poor investment because in the long run Simulacrum will outperform other summons because they don't get stronger with you as you level. When deciding what to soul capture, the level of the original enemy may not be a big deal. Focus instead on immunities and useful stuff it casts.

Does anyone know whether Vengeful Shade differs from Greater Shade in any way other than creature level?

A maxed Drake is a useful addition to any party, and the healing/ hostile effect removal of the utility skill is handy as well. But Shaman damage output is poor no matter what you do. However, they can make better use of attack scarabs than melee characters who have increased strength over dexterity, so giving one or two of the cone attack scarabs to a shaman in a party with a strength/endurance blademaster and any third member (though a tinkermage is of course best) is a good way to make them at least somewhat useful independent of their drake.

Slartibus, thank you very much for doing additional testing. I had under-estimated how much caster level effected the level of the summoned creatures. That would explain how summon major aid stays useful even as the player characters and enemies increase in level. Drake never had Circle of Fire, but Salamander does in both Avadon 1 and 2. The Drake's Cone of Fire can be used every other turn however, and once you've maxed out Beast Focus (including equipment and the 3 specializations), its damage is comparable to the Cone of Fire scarab - my PC shaman went 1:1 Int/Endurance, and my drake's Cone of Fire actually hits for more damage than my PC using the scarab. I think that if summons worked how I had guessed they would - each level of the summon skill adds a level to the creature, with levels 7 and 8 each adding 4 levels - then summons would be a bit too strong. However, I think every other level of the summon skill adding a level to the summon, with levels 7 and 8 each adding 2 (in keeping with how damage skills work) would be balanced and a lot more intuitive.

Any chance Jeff would be interested in a more complete version of this? I know he's not much for bug fix patches, but either the tool tip is wrong or the skills aren't working the way he intended. Fixing the level 7 and 8 being useless bit, if nothing else, would go a long way toward making Shamans competitive with Tinkermages as summoners.

So I've spent a few hours testing how Shaman summons work, and the results are a bit odd. 1). There appears to be no meaningful increase in the strength of the summoned creature with higher levels of the summon skill (possibly a 4% difference in armor between a salamander summoned with 1 in the skill versus one summoned with 8 in the skill, and slightly better initiative, along with a bit longer summon duration). A wolf with 2 points in the summoning skill is basically identical to a wolf with 11 in the summoning skill. So not only do summon skills not give a bonus for levels 7 and 8, as the tool tip says they do, levels 7 and 8 in summon skills are basically wasted skill points. Don't raise Call Salamander to 7 or 8. It's pointless. 2). The only meaningful difference between the summon types is their active skill. A level 2 Wolf and a level 8 Drake appear to have the same armor, health and melee attack strength. The Drake is stronger only because it has a better active skill (Cone of Fire every 2 turns versus War Curse every 12). 3). Beast Focus, on the other hand, increases the power of summoned creatures immensely. A level 1 Salamander with 0 in Beast Focus against my test enemies (four archers who appear identical and have no abilities beyond basic attack) died in an average of 12 hits of ~25 damage each. A level 1 Salamander with 14 in Beast Focus only lost about 30% of it's health after taking 42 hits from the same enemies, with an average damage of about 8 damage/hit. Beast Focus also greatly increases the power of AOE attacks for the summoned creatures that have them. 4). The damage of summoned creature AOE attacks appears to increase a bit with the level of the player character. This was unexpected. I have not done testing on whether they get stronger in any way other than increased AOE attack strength, but would not be surprised if they did. 5). Not that I expected it to, but Beast Focus doesn't help when a shaman uses Summon Major Aid with a scarab. Would be cool if it did though. 6). The Drake's average Cone of Fire attack damage is higher than the Hell Hound's at equal levels of beast focus, and the margin increases with additional levels of beast focus. This all has some interesting implications. For instance, a player who rushes for Drakes better enjoy that Cone of Fire every 2 turns, because if he'd gone for Beast Focus 8 instead, his Hell Hound could take more than 3 times the damage and would have a much stronger melee attack, as well as a stronger cone of fire (only available every 4 turns rather than every 2, but still...). Second, if you want the strongest possible drakes, increase beast focus every way you can. There are items available that increase beast focus by a total of +5, and a drake summoned with those is vastly stronger than one summoned without. Does this all seem to be working as Jeff intended? Or is this bugged? I would think, intuitively, that a wolf with 8 points in call wolf should be quite a bit better than one with only 1 point in call wolf, and that a Drake should be stronger than a wolf in more ways than just having a cone of fire attack, but maybe that's just me.

Razor flinger is still pretty darn good though. It only damages a single target, but it damages that target quite a bit. So far as I can tell, it hits for roughly 2x what the bolt flinger does.

And a couple of them were conscripted against their will... they seriously can not be expected, practically or ethically, to support Avadon or care about the job they never wanted.

Better dice, but much longer re-charge times on the abilities. And even were that not the case, I think we're stretching "similar" quite a lot if we're claiming Shaman combat skill damage is comparable to Sorc combat skill damage. The highest level Shaman attack skills use dex rather than int, and having a 33% better die doesn't matter much when the other guy has twice the die rolls. You could push dex over int, but then your base attack will be horrible damage and rarely land. You could use javelins, but without a skill to increase their damage or accuracy, the damage will be minimal there as well. I understand looking for a silver lining, particularly given that Shaman is my favorite class, but sadly the combat skills are just awful compared to every other class. Fortunately the passives, utility skills and summons are decent enough, so long as you don't compare them to Blademaster or especially Tinkermage.

As Triumph says, the in-game documentation is pretty scanty, but the forum community does an outstanding job of figuring out the mechanics and sharing with those of us who lack the technical skill to do so . I never play a spiderweb game without thoroughly studying each thread linked in that game's Strategy Central thread. Don't fret if you've not built your party the way you'd like to have in Avadon 1 .

Randomizer, do you know how large the bonus is? Do skill points placed in specific summon skills beyond level 6 (so 7 and up) increase the turret level by 4 per skill point, the same way that attack skills get 4 damage levels for each skill level beyond 6? Also, same question but with Shaman creature summons?

Yep, Dex/Endurance Shaman makes sense in Avadon 1. But that's because it made a great evade tank, it was a defensive build. In 2, Dex is much less useful defensively, defeating the purpose of the build. And even in Avadon 1, Dex/Endurance Shamans were better served by ignoring the combat tree past the level one skill and going for drakes instead, since most of the combat tree is functionally useless to them, as it relies on Intelligence.

Two balance suggestions: 1. Increase the Creature Summon limit to 2 per shaman, 4 per party, so that shamans can summon both a wolf line creature and a drake line creature at the same time. This is in line with Tinkermages being able to have two turrets out at a time. 2. Change the physical damage shaman casting skills so that they are controlled by intelligence rather than by dexterity. No one is (rationally) going to pump dexterity as a shaman if they are speccing into the combat side of the skill tree, but that renders the top combat skill of only limited use, since without pushing dexterity it's not going to do decent damage. Since the top combat skill is weak unless a shaman goes with a bizarre attribute allocation, by extension, all of the shaman combat skills other than spirit claw don't look so hot. The split dex/int requirements to get decent damage out of the combat line of skills makes the whole line unattractive.

Does anyone know whether turrets and shaman summons get bonuses for levels 7+ in the active skill like the attack skills do? Interesting observation indeed on beelining for rank 6 top-tier skills. As cool as tinker mages look, I'm going with a Shaman for my first character, because I want to see what Drakes do when you get them half way through the game rather than near the end.

Err... I RP a shaper who peeks in at lvl 32, takes a look a the end boss and nopes back out until he's gotten a bit better at his job? Seriously though, I wouldn't recommend going for Ur-Drakons in a first playthrough, as you've got to take some immersion breaking steps to make it work. Ur-Drakons are so fun though that I don't personally mind that tradeoff.

G5 is probably my favorite game ever, and I loved that there wasn't a single over-powered path. There are a wide variety of approaches that can succeed on Torment, but each of them has its own learning curve (I still can't make Agents work, but I know other players have had great success with them). I also liked the ambiguity of the story, and the fact that a bunch of interested parties claimed knowledge of the PC's past but never shared it/had it to begin with. The NPCs had their own agendas and their interest in the PC extended to what they could get out of him (or her). Rawal had no clue who you were, but is a manipulative jerk who judged that information on the PC's past would be a powerful carrot to hold out. The few who seemed to actually know who you were all seem to have had reason not to tell you. I'm ok with that.

As QuickLex said, all of the top tier creations can tank fairly well (though Drakons do suffer a bit against magic damage, so for fire creation focused playthroughs I like to aim for at least one highly leveled Kyshaak, in order to deal/tank magic damage). So far as I've been able to determine, raising stats beyond 2 intelligence in creations is sometimes viable but almost never optimal. It's usually objectively better to add another creation/upgrade a weaker creation type to a stronger one. The only possible exception i've come across is that with extremely high levels of magic shaping, an Ur-Glaahk with increased dex makes a pretty good evade tank. Ur-Glaahks are simply 10 levels higher than normal Glaahks if memory serves, but that's actually quite a boost. Unfortunately, stun is a very weak effect in G5, so Glaahks are basically weak compared to other tier 3 creations. Ur-Drakons are obtainable with quite a bit of game left, but it's a pain in the neck to get them. They're awesome though. I just love Ur-Drakons.

For a Creation Focused Shaper: Ring: Projection Band or Shaper's boon, with the Forbidden Band situationally useful Necklace: Talisman of Might, also good to pick up Tribal Fetish, Black Pearl Talisman and/or Volcanic Fetish Belt: Projection Belt, Belt of Genius, Student's Belt and Girdle of Victory are all useful at different points. Legs: For most of the game, probably Swamp Pants. Eventually Firesteel or Black Iron Greaves. Chest: Need the Shaper's Robe, but the Transference Suit and Shaper Trueweave eventually. Cloak: Symbiotic Cloak Gloves: Firesteel or Lifecraft Gauntlets (I like Lifecraft, players who actually know what they are talking about prefer Firesteel). Boots: Samaritan Sandals, Assassin Boots, Captain's Boots (only for swapping to buff) Weapon: Early on, Captain's Shiv and/or Empathy Blade. Eventually Thirsting Knife or Guardian Claymore.

I somewhat recently got all 5 also, and started with G5. It's possibly my favorite game I've ever played. I'm playing through G1 right now, and part of me wishes I'd done that first, because I wouldn't hold it up to the standard set by it's more refined descendant. G1 is all about the writing and world building. But both are excellent.

Does the game world ever really suggest that Shapers are particularly skilled at governance? They're immensely powerful militarily ("every shaper is an army") and highly intelligent, but they certainly seem to value shaping ability more highly than administrative skills. It'd be quite surprising if masters of such a demanding art happened to also be politically adept enough to efficiently govern a complex state. Getting that good at something as hard as shaping takes focus - probably something even beyond a PHD equivalent. I think they rule because they are (or were for most of their history) militarily dominant, not because they are good at ruling. It doesn't seem common to find outsiders who genuinely think they govern well.

Meat I suppose, if I had to give something up. Were I a rational person (ironic given the pseudonym I picked) I'd go with sugar of course, as it's the only option with no important nutritional role. There are vegetable and dairy based protein sources however, so I could make do without meat. But not without chocolate - so meat goes, sugar stays.

You might consider dropping it down to hard. What comes next is worse, if the drayks are giving you trouble. Preemptive suggestions: SPOILERS Use the pyramid formation with your player character in the back. Make sure you bring enough leadership buffing gear to get to 10. Clear the entry area first, then go back and ask for help. Try to let the soldier and battle gammas tank. Bring essence pods. Hold your rots back until the battle gammas engage the line, or else they'll get shredded. If you have open roster slots, consider a drayk or two - nothing tanks drakons better (including your own drakons). If the allied kyshaaks pick out a gazer, take it down fast so they'll retarget something they can actually damage. On torment, at one point, you'll be up against around 8k incoming raw damage/turn. You've either got to use mental magic to reduce that or deal enough damage to whittle down the enemy force while the battle gammas live. Your allies can mostly win this for you, you just need to support them adequately.